If you want to be a clever person, you have to learn how to ask cleverly, how to listen attentively, how to respond quietly, and how to stop talking when there is nothing more to say.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Quotes
A long long time ago I began collecting inspirational quotes and aphorisms which became my collection of quotes.
Foreign currency
Advice is like being handed a large amount of foreign currency. What do you do with it?
~ Rhik Samadder
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Well-employed
Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings blessed death.
~ Leonardo da Vinci
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Just ask
If you’re a pole vaulter, you need a long runway to pick up the speed required to plant the pole and flip over the bar. Odds are you are not a pole vaulter. You don’t need a runway of context, justification, and general flim-flam to be curious. It’s not really about you. Save everyone the time, and just ask the question.
~ Michael Bungay Stanier
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Fleeing
A coward flees backward, away from new things. A man of courage flees forward, in the midst of new things.
~ Jacques Maritain
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Shoes on your feet
A degree on your wall means you’re educated as much as shoes on your feet mean you’re walking. It’s a start, but hardly sufficient. […] Just as you can walk plenty well without shoes, you don’t need to step into a classroom to understand the basic, fundamental reality of nature and of our proper role in it. Begin with awareness and reflection. Not just once, but every single second of every single day.
~ Ryan Holiday
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Thank you
When someone reveals something that they’re struggling with, or something painful that happened to them, I often find myself saying, “I’m so sorry, thank you for sharing that with me.” Let’s acknowledge that you’ve just said something, that there’s nothing I can say that’s gonna lift that pain. By saying that, you’re focusing the conversation on what they’ve disclosed to you. You can also talk about how you’re talking about it. You can say, “I don’t know what to say right now. But I just want to tell you, I’m really sorry to know that.”
~ Anna Sale
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Discipline
To create a meaningful work of art or to make a discovery or invention requires great discipline, self-control, and emotional stability. It requires mastering the forms of your field. […] When you look at the exceptionally creative work of Masters, you must not ignore the years of practice, the endless routines, the hours of doubt, and the tenacious overcoming of obstacles these people endured.
~ Robert Greene
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Lucky
What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient, but restless mind, of sacrificing one’s ease or vanity, of uniting a love of detail to foresight, and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully.
~ Victor Cherbuliez
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Ridiculous
The moral? That there is no greater homage we could pay Proust than to end up passing the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin, namely, that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it.
“To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: It does not constitute it.”
Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.
~ Alain de Botton
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Outstandingly creative
What makes the difference between an outstandingly creative person and a less creative one is not any special power, but greater knowledge (in the form of practiced expertise) and the motivation to acquire and use it. This motivation endures for long periods, perhaps shaping and inspiring a whole lifetime.
~ Margaret A. Boden
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Pale facsimilies
We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale facsimiles.
~ Marcel Proust
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The answer
I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.
~ Jim Carrey
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Think more
Read less, study less, but think more. Learn, both from your teachers and from the books which you read, only those things which you really need and which you really want to know.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Silence kept
For every time you regret that you did not say something, you will regret a hundred times that you did not keep your silence.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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True optimism
[True optimism involves] seeing the world as it is, yet still believing—and more importantly behaving—in ways that create better outcomes for all of us.
~ Karen Reivich
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Social media
We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad… all we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.
~ Ian Bogost
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Entire vital function
So far as man stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, his entire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes. Not a victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, except upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a scientific exploration or experiment or textbook, that may not be a mistake. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.
~ William James
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Rejection
Creating something that can be turned down takes discipline and courage, so there’s reason to feel pride for each rejection.
~ Rhaina Cohen
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Ordinary
The extraordinary doesn’t wipe out the ordinary. People get married in wartime. Babies are born during pandemics. My mom drew water fro my bath while my father did test runs for the end of the world.
~ Mary Laura Philpott
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